Nigerian BridePrice app goes viral

The BridePrice app is only five days old but it has gained more attention than the creators could ever have imagined.

The app works by asking a series of questions about different tasks the woman can do with an amount on the side. The web application then calculates how much in terms of cash and physical appearance the woman’s bride price is worth.

“I want to start by saying it’s a joke and secondly, it’s an inside joke that might be misunderstood by people outside the country and Africa,” Editi Effionf, CEO of Anakle told CNBC Africa.

The app that was designed by a group in Nigeria called Anakle, hit the twittersphere a few days ago and has without a doubt sparked controversy in not only Nigeria but other parts of the world as Africans everywhere hold varying opinions about the real meaning of the app.

“We started by wanting to create something, maybe a joke that gets attention and that we could use to record data. That’s really what happened.”

“The real inspiration came when we saw a picture that was a bride price list and we just upgraded that. We want to write about relationships and marriage which was the second most popular topic on social media in Nigeria, so we decided to do this,” he explained.

The app was created to record data and although the creators of the app expected it to go viral, they didn’t expect it to do as well as it currently does.

“We expected about a million hits in maybe four countries but we beat that. We got hits from 56 countries and we got four million twitter conversations in about 30 hours and six million in three days. The elders have done roughly 100 billion naira in bride price transactions as we speak,” he said.

Nigeria is among the continent’s top tweeting nations and has the biggest internet market in Africa as the country currently has over 56 million internet users. With the large youth population expected to continue to rise, experts have projected further growth in the space.

“I work for an advertising company. Anakle is actually a digital agency and we build stuff for brands, we help brands communicate so we are not in short, people who are really crazy and think of funny things,” he added.